A Review of Rainbow In The Night — by Andrea S. Randle

I did not go into Rainbow In The Night as a neutral observer.

I went in as a woman who knows what it is to make a decision in the dark — alone, afraid, and carrying a weight of shame so heavy it had no language yet. I went in as a survivor of childhood trauma, of sexual violence that began before I was old enough to understand what was being taken from me. I went in as someone who spent years building a life that looked whole on the outside while quietly carrying things inside that I had never said out loud.

I went in as someone who had an abortion, endured physical abuse and abandonment as a child.

I say that plainly because the shame around it is exactly what Jane Goldie Winn’s film is dismantling — and it would be dishonest of me to write this review without saying the thing the film gave me permission to say.

Rainbow In The Night is not a comfortable film. It is not meant to be. It is meant to do what truth does — move through you, rearrange something, and leave you different than it found you.

Jane’s story is not my story. But the territory she walks through — the layers of trauma, the silence that follows violation, the decision made in fear rather than freedom, the long road back to oneself through surrender and forgiveness — I know that territory. I have walked it. And watching her walk it out on screen, with such unflinching honesty and such evident grace, I found myself weeping — not from pain, but from recognition and a sense of being understood.

There is something sacred that happens when a woman tells the truth about her life without apology or performance. When she names the shame, the confusion, the choices that were never as simple as anyone outside of them pretended they were. When she shows you that healing is not the erasure of what happened — it is the integration of it into a life that continues, that matters, that has purpose.

That is what this film does.

For anyone who has carried a secret pregnancy — ended or otherwise. For anyone who has survived sexual violence, family dysfunction and spent years wondering if what happened to them somehow made them less worthy of wholeness. For anyone who learned early that silence was safer than truth. For anyone who has been handed shame instead of compassion by the very communities that should have known better.

This film is for you.

I have spent my entire career creating spaces where people can speak the things they have been carrying in silence. The Compassion Clinic Resource Center exists because I know firsthand what it costs a person to stay silent — and what becomes possible when they finally do not have to.

Rainbow In The Night is that kind of space. In ninety minutes, Goldie Winn creates a room where honesty is welcome, where pain is honored, and where the viewer is quietly given permission to totally surrender something they have been carrying for far too long.

I do not review films lightly. I am recommending this one with my whole self — not as a professional, but as a person whose life it touched.

Go see it. And bring someone with you who needs to know they are not alone.

— Andrea S. Randle Founder & Executive Director, The Compassion Clinic Resource Center Christiansburg, Virginia

TheCompassionClinic.org